Lending his write hand

The Temple-Goers is a fine novel. Most of its characters come across as real. The plot is news by other means. The staple sex scene is comic in its tragic details . And the novel seriously tries to make sense of the India that the author, Aatish Taseer, thinks he is intimate with.

Taseer tells the story of what happens to the narrator and his girl friend, Sanyogita, both recently returned from London where they seem not to do much besides living the good life. What happens to their relationship is India, specifically Delhi. Perhaps it is the raw urges of a newly material people; or the heat that bares the brain down to the last thought; or a certain vantage point that people reach in relation to each other, an intangible terminus they arrive at along the coordinates of a place and its alluvial culture. The cumulative result is the end of a relationship.

Quirks are at the quick of the novel. For instance , the narrator, in a sustained fit of narcissistic self-validation, christens himself Aatish. Oh-Oh. And, much later in the story, he has another character — a poet, naturally — endorse the first person device. Who else would take you over the uncharted seas but I?

Full report here Times of India